Way back when, we had a cottage.
2 min readMar 30, 2022
- Some might consider the fact that all the chipmunks around my family’s cottage had red eyes to be strange. But that’s not so peculiar. The fact that they only went after the nuts with shells was slightly more so. The fact that they would chitter dark indulgences in the ears of my siblings and myself was, when one considers the goings-on at said cottage, perfectly normal. After all. The geese swam backwards, the fish uncaught themselves, and every so often the tide would come out. (Being Catholic, my family carefully ignored the lattermost.)
- This was of course hardly anything strange to those of a youthful bent. We were away from civilization, in the wilds as it were, and bereft of such necessities as internet and the makings thereof, we certainly had no basis for comparison. So we unfed the geese and enjoyed waiting for the toaster to pop so that we could get some fresh bread.
- Were we to take a moment’s consideration for the nature of the entire situation, we might have considered why Sarah Connor died every time in a tragedy a dozen times watched, or that Simba’s father kept leaping up from the pit. But we were young, and, to be honest, the story of Hamlet had never quite been told to us.
- These are the sorts of stories we’ll inevitably be told, where the chipmunks quietly reassemble the nuts we were going to throw at them, and we enjoy the gently-burnt marshmallows as they run from our mouths into the fires and sticks.
- They’re never going to believe it. Where for that tiny little moment, we spiraled back… but that’s okay. They needn’t believe it. They might think of it as just another story by their silly old parents.
- When we tell these tales to our children, perhaps they’ll understand — in a tiny sense — what it meant to see the building standing true and short, awaiting the constructors as the squirrels and chipmunks ungathered round for one last time. The future awaits us all, and for a brief period, no matter how silly it was, looking forward, it was nice to step backwards.
- Though I wouldn’t mind teaching them how to unfeed a goose.
